Hands Down: Working Title
by Lee G
Summary: Friday the 13th the Series & Dark Shadows Crossover where the antique avengers are searching for the legendary Hand of Petofi.
1. Chapter 1

Dark Shadows &Friday the 13th The Series  
  
Crossover  
  
Hands Down  
  
Chapter 1  
  
"This is so undignified." Mickey grimaced. Her warm, volcanic green eyes took in the scene before her: dust-laden shades, one lone window, and worst of all, a single bed small enough to sneeze through the window of the closed bicycle shop across the street. "Only two rooms, no porters, no extra beds, no—"  
  
"Aw, come on, Mick!" Ryan prodded. He dumped his duffel bag next to a mirror with a cracked wood frame and plopped down onto the bed. "Up until a few minutes ago you loved this town. 'Quaint and picturesque,' if I remember correctly?" Though her cousin was grinning like an idiot, she knew he was uncomfortable, too. He just hated to show it.  
  
Mickey's shoulders sagged. "That was until we found a hotel that has never heard of a roll-away bed," she said in a pinched voice. Ryan bounced up and down on the mattress before flopping down totally horizontal.  
  
"Don't get bent out of shape," he said. "I'm sure you'll love sleeping on the floor, once you get used to it."  
  
Mickey ignored him and sat on the corner of the bed. She slipped off her tight, red suede pumps and proceeded to massage her sore heels. "And who ever heard of a town like this having only one hotel—they're packed way beyond their means!"  
  
Ryan laughed. He unzipped his jacket, exposing a faded red t-shirt with the name of a rowdy rock band Mickey had never cared to familiarize herself with. "Guess conventions on the occult are big potatoes around small hick towns like this."  
  
"Somehow I doubt that," she frowned. She closed her eyes a moment and at last got back onto her feet, kicking the pumps under the bed. Ryan watched her pace by the window.  
  
"Thing is," he said, "we should be in the center ring for this freak show." He lay down and chuckled, hoping he was lightening the mood a notch.  
  
Mickey didn't answer. Her mouth was kept pinned in a straight line. She rested her hands on her hips as she surveyed the room. It was small, no doubt, but it had charm. The walls were wallpapered with a neutral design of pastel clipper ships roughing it on the high seas. Three antique paintings depicting the harsh but romantic life of fishermen, hung opposite the bathroom. All the furniture was pine, but painted in a dark, glazed finish with attractive old-fashioned brass hardware. The only problems were cracking walls that hadn't been fixed since they were built one hundred years ago, dust on the windowsills and no phones or digital clock radio alarms. What a morning wake-up call consisted of, they would soon discover was an old-fashioned knock on the door every ten minutes until someone answered.  
  
In a show of brave optimism, Mickey dragged one of her three suitcases to the corner nearest the dresser, tried not to look cross that her cousin wasn't offering to help, and took a deep breath before returning to the hall for the last of her luggage. "I mean, this is a far cry from Chicago," she at last commented. "I've never seen a place so cut off from the rest of the world. A four-hour ride from the airport, not even a television for God's sake . . .!"  
  
"We've been in worser situations," Ryan pointed out. He laced his fingers behind his head on the pillow and released a comfortable moan. "Remember when we all went undercover at that Monastery?"  
  
Mickey rolled her eyes. Avoiding touching the rusted radiator spitting behind the door, she dragged in the last of her luggage. "Don't remind me. But I still don't understand why you couldn't share a room with Jack."  
  
Ryan lowered his eyes and grinned at the small space between he and the edge of the bed. "I don't think we'd be right for each other, there, Mickey. Only one old pudgy middle-aged man per square inch. And don't you dare tell him I said that."  
  
Mickey shook her head, already exasperated with her cousin's immeasurable good humor. They had four days in this room until a new one opened up...after the 2-day lecture at the college just outside of town. The small spaces and Ryan's constant jokes would be the test of all tests. At least at their small second floor apartment above the store (the staircase literally emptied right into Ryan's "bedroom" space) Mickey had the option of closing her frilly curtained French doors and ignoring him for a while.  
  
After freshening up in the bathroom, Mickey emerged with a fresh new layer of makeup and her wild red frizzles she had for hair tamed into a barrette bundled up in beads. Her sleek fitted animal print Capri pants and red lace up bodice blouse looked like she had just walked out of a fashion shoot in a Beverly Hills nightclub. But it was February in the tip-top region of New England and she was cold. But she looked good and for the moment, she would thing Spring thoughts. Egyptian gold earrings yanked painfully on her earlobes. Mickey took them out, rubbed the immediate soreness out and hunted for a new pair of earrings.  
  
She picked out her Chinese character earrings, each one with a different character, though she had never noticed it or knew the true meaning of either one. Ryan had already unpacked and was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, nose buried inside of a room service menu. Knowing her cousin, Mickey had more than a sneaking suspicion that inside it was stashed a limp, shabby-looking comic book. He was twenty-six, only two years younger than she was, but she sometimes felt like she was dealing with a twelve year old.  
  
Mickey began to unpack her suitcase and deposit its contents into what few drawers Ryan hadn't already claimed. "Haven't you already read that one?" she asked, though she already knew his answer. As if on cue, a motley- colored comic book flopped out from its hiding place out onto Ryan's chest. Ryan's cheeks bent into that simple, boyish grin of his. With his short brown hair looking mussed and his dark, round brown eyes sparkling with mischief, Mickey smiled despite herself. He was just a big child.  
  
"What, Captain Morman of Worbo?" he asked, acting offended. "It's still good the second—or tenth—time around. Comics are like a good movie. You know what happens but getting there is half the fun."  
  
"Well, we're not here for fun. Remember?"  
  
Ryan's porous smile sunk into seriousness. "How can I forget? That's hardly a part of my vocabulary anymore. And you're not the only one suffering, I'll have you know. I had to give up a date with the most beautiful, sexy, and, well—you know— woman on this earth to come here. We don't even know if that hand, or whatever, is even still here in Collinsport. Did Jack tell you anymore about this thing than he did to me?"  
  
Mickey scrunched her lips to the side and than passively shook her head. "Not really."  
  
"We don't know what this thing does at all?"  
  
Mickey opened her mouth but found she had only the same doubts her cousin had rising to greet her. Her confirming shrug was all she needed to say. The slap of the hotel menu as Ryan struck it against his hand made her jump.  
  
"So we're going into this blind, as usual. My favorite, and just happens to be our specialty, might I add."  
  
Mickey yanked the cord for the blinds, sending a swirling cloud of dust into the air. She waved it away, sneezed, and bent down to open the top dresser drawer. "Look," she said a little testily, "all I know is that he wanted to come up and look for this K. Young's widow, the name that was written in Uncle Lewis's ledger and see if we could just buy the hand back."  
  
"Yeah, right," Ryan scoffed. "Like it's ever been that easy. That tagline is getting very old. But how does this convention dinner thing tonight fit in?"  
  
She shut one drawer and yanked open the next one which was stiff with rust and New England dampness. Something dark skittered just out of view. She shivered and unconsciously wiped her palms on her thighs and said, "The woman who is the guest speaker is an expert in the field of religious relics and talismans. Since Jack could find next to nothing about the hand in his research, he thought he could kill two birds with one stone and see what he could find out from her. Don't forget, it's at eight o'clock—and we have to dress for the occasion."  
  
Her cousin made a face. "You know," he said, half moaning as he got up from his lying position, "whether you see it or not, we're kind of like the comic superheroes like Captain Morman here. We pretend to be good law- abiding citizens by day and by night we're evil-fighting machines, ready for action when the sun sets. Except we don't have the x-ray vision or those fancy costumes and stuff."  
  
Mickey sent him a look telling him she didn't buy it. She worried about the same things Ryan did. She at least admitted that much. Every day was a new challenge, facing killers that had once been good people, but had been blackened by the touch of the Devil's greedy power. Their seemingly endless search for fatal antiques wore on them like a dull knife on a strip of rope. Even Ryan's energetic jokes had taken on a more caustic delivery lately, sounding more tired, bitter. She was sure it was changing her, too, but didn't like to think too hard about it. It only made her angry. But Jack had dedicated his whole life to recovering the cursed antiques, making it his one and only goal whereas she and Ryan had gotten sucked into the realm of blackness and lies purely accidentally. The three of them had come close to death so many times chasing after the owners of the antiques who had become so possessed by their greed that they would stop at nothing until they got to the top. But these spineless killers always found they would never be satisfied, and the unquenchable thirst for blood would drive them onward, more and more into insanity.  
  
Life had been so simple just a few years ago. Mickey had been engaged to a successful, young, ambitious lawyer, was planning a career in music as a promising singer—and suddenly she found herself saddled with an inheritance she didn't want, and still couldn't get rid of. She and Ryan had thought the recovery of the antiques they had unwittingly sold the day before they met Jack would only take a week, maybe two. When weeks turned to months, Mickey began to realize what she had gotten herself into. But even though her fiancé put it to her that it was either him or the store, she found she couldn't abandon Ryan and Jack and the work they did. Selfishly, many times she wished their Uncle Lewis hadn't died. But that wouldn't have made anything any better. Lewis would still have been running his antique shop, circulating more and more of his dangerous, cursed wares.  
  
Mickey pushed the past away in a violent rush of will and turned her attention back to her job of unpacking. She got down on one knee and a swelling scent of mothballs greeted her. A black speck like a discarded button rested on a pile of clothes she had just put down. She didn't remember seeing it there before but wasn't really concerned how it got there. Before folding the jeans she had in hand, she made a quick brushing movement across the neatly folded satiny cloth of the blouse to remove it. In a flash she leapt back, the jeans landing in a clump on the floor.  
  
"Oh my god, spider!!" she screamed.  
  
"And every superhero has his kryptonite," joked her unaffected cousin.  
  
"Oh shut-up, Ryan, and just kill it!" she cried shrilly.  
  
"All right, all right, don't get all worked up. It's just a spider." Ryan got to his feet, rolling up his comic book in a tight tube shape. "You face death and demons every day and you're clowning around about a harmless bug."  
  
"I don't care," she insisted hotly.  
  
Ryan shifted through the drawers and almost jumped himself when he saw the size of the arachnid. "Stand back, Mickey. This one may splatter." Mickey moaned at his theatrics, but still took a safe vantage point behind him to make sure she saw the spider's quick and complete demise. Swinging with the might of a lightening strike, Ryan made contact. The spider was dead, for sure, though he stuck like glue to the death-enforced instrument. "Feels like those Monastery days all over again, doesn't it?" he said grimacing at the mangled carcass.  
  
"My hero," she tossed back sarcastically.  
  
Ryan grinned. "Can't imagine what you would've done without me sharing the room tonight. You would have probably stayed up all night with a flashlight."  
  
"That's not funny, Ryan," she huffed. She grabbed a blouse from the suitcase and shook it with an indignant snap. A mild knock and a soft muffled voice broke up the mutiny building between the cousins.  
  
"Mickey? Ryan?"  
  
She and Ryan exchanged knowing glances.  
  
"Yeah, Jack?" answered Ryan though the door. He was frowning over his favorite piece of literature now smeared with insect guts.  
  
"I'm already settled in. I'll be waiting for you downstairs in the diner when you're ready." Jack obviously didn't expect an answer, for they heard his footsteps pepper away from their door as soon as he stopped speaking. They would have guessed as much. Whenever they were on a case, Jack never thought, ate, breathed or lived anything but accomplishing their mission. Ryan found a trashcan and let the comic book fall in with a deadening clunk.  
  
"Get that cape on, Captain Morman," he said giving a sloppy smirk. "It's down into the mines we go."  
  
Mickey made sure she made her cousin aware she found nothing funny about it and abandoned the task of unpacking to get ready to meet Jack downstairs. 


	2. Chapter 2

Dark Shadows &Friday the 13th The Series  
  
Crossover  
  
Hands Down  
  
Chapter 2  
  
Angelique Collins pinned the last flawless blonde curl into place when she heard Hoffman's telltale walk coming down the hall then stop outside her closed double doors. "Come in, Hoffman," she entreated even before the woman had the chance to knock. It was always like this between the two women. They understood each other all too well.  
  
Hoffman, a severe looking woman about mid-forties, opened the doors sturdy double doors and closed them behind her in one well-practiced swoop. She had pale marble skin and deep red hair done into a bun, and wearing a modest black dress and a sour expression as she did everyday. "Ms. Corrinne Skinner is waiting for you down in the Drawing Room," she informed her mistress rather unenthusiastically.  
  
Angelique plucked a short chain from her jewelry chest, pleased with her choice. A smooth tear shaped pearl quivered as she lifted it to her neck. "Thank you, Hoffman. Oh, Hoffman," she called out. Hoffman turned in her tracks, her arms arcing out from her body as if by whiplash. "Do help me with this necklace, would you?" The maid took the chain into her hands. Angelique waited patiently until the necklace fell to her skin, latched and secure. The woman was naturally stunning, but jewels only enhanced her allure. She fingered the pearl tentatively, though she was already thinking over what perfume to wear.  
  
"You look radiant tonight, Mrs. Collins," Hoffman said softly, taking away her warm, pasty hands and putting them into her pockets. Angelique saw that spark of adoration in her maid's judgmental green-grey eyes.  
  
"Thank you, Hoffman."  
  
Hoffman picked up a few dresses from the bed and surrounding chairs, choices Angelique rejected for the engagement tonight. The beautiful woman sat down at her mirror and brushed a faint pink rouge across her ageless, unmarred cheekbones. The warm, tiffany lights cast a bronze glow on her face and her large, owl-like blue eyes stared back at her with satisfaction. She had to admit it to herself: there was no doubt she was positively irresistible.  
  
Applying lipstick to her full lips, she stared a moment at herself. Ever since she had been a child, her father had told her and her twin sister that they would take the world by storm when they matured. Angelique soon found her looks to astound those around her, and quickly put that to good use. She was infectious, even unavoidably intoxicating and that became the key to her sociability. There came a day when her more traditional sister, Alexis, tired of having her twin sister steal the limelight and always being told she would never match up to her sister. Taking one last look at her home, she left Collinsport. The Stokes family became nothing but a bitter memory. She traveled to Europe to console herself with people who didn't expect her to be anyone but herself. Angelique didn't concern herself. She shared little kinship with anyone. It wasn't long before she landed herself a husband though seduction, he being the most eligible, sought after, and richest man in town.  
  
"Is Mr. Collins bringing you to the lecture dinner tonight?" asked Hoffman upon returning from the closet in her boudoir. Angelique froze mid-stroke with a mascara brush.  
  
"No," she answered tersely, returning the brush to its vessel. "No, Mr. Collins won't be going tonight. I have someone else in mind to be my escort."  
  
"Oh?" Hoffman pursed her lips. She kneeled on the window seat on the other side of the room to draw the bright green and teal curtains closed. "You didn't tell me about this. Who do you have in mind?"  
  
Angelique rose from her chair, the icy, moonlight-blue satin fabric of her dress conforming to her attractive figure. She smiled inside at the sleekness of it on her skin. She refrained from voicing the words Hoffman already knew: Quentin, as usual, was infuriated with her interest in the occult. and would have nothing to do with the dinner tonight. He most likely would not even see her off. Naturally she had to look elsewhere for a common thread of interest. Quentin had little patience with his wife's dabbling interests and could always be expected to disappear when her father or Aunt Hannah came to visit, the two most influential people in her life that had encouraged her interest since she could remember. Her bedroom was now on the farthest extremity of the East Wing because of their feigned marriage. It was rarely visited by her husband. The strain on their marriage and relationship had become even more apparent now that their son had been sent away to school. Tonight was just one more attempt on her part to move her husband in the only way she knew, to induce any kind of emotional response toward her even if it was fury. Angelique watched Hoffman pull the curtains a little tighter against the harsh evening sunset.  
  
"Damion," she answered her companion unconcernedly. "Damion Edwards."  
  
"Mr. Edwards?" Hoffman froze, her thin mouth forming a small "o." She looked about to fall off her high horse. "I'd rather you didn't go at all, then, if that's your only choice. I've never approved of him and I didn't think you did, either. Even Mr. Bruno Hess would be a more suitable choice."  
  
Angelique turned. Her expression wrought unsuppressed ire. Sharp-edged daggers slick with venom surfaced in her soulful eyes. "What would you have me do, then? Go alone and look like a complete fool? There's talk enough without fueling the fire. And you forget who's mistress of this house and who isn't! It's not your place to make my decisions for me, is it, Hoffman?"  
  
A cold silence pulsed like electricity between the women that could be felt from across the room. Hoffman's chin elevated into an indignant position. Angelique could almost feel her anger subside. But she couldn't apologize. As dedicated as they were to each other, Angelique couldn't let her maid become accustomed to overstepping her place. It wouldn't be accepted by her husband's affluent family. Not that she was a slave to convention, but she was trying to fit the role of the Lady-of-the-manor in every mode just to stay on top where she had effortlessly placed herself. At last Hoffman broke the silence, though her body was defensively rigid.  
  
"I am sorry, Mrs. Collins. I will never speak out of turn again."  
  
Angelique hated to put that wedge in their relationship. Hoffman had been dedicated to her, almost to a fault, since her marriage to Quentin. Besides her many male companions, Julia Hoffman had been her only true and loyal friend in Collinwood. They held no secrets from each other. Angelique drew herself up into a regal posture and nodded, accepting the apology gracefully. "That's fine, Hoffman. Please go downstairs and tell Corinne I will be right with her."  
  
Like a ghost receding into the shadows of night at first light, Hoffman left to do her mistress's bidding. 


	3. Chapter 3

Dark Shadows &Friday the 13th The Series  
  
Crossover  
  
Hands Down  
  
Chapter 3  
  
After a quick "huddle" and a light dinner to satisfy a day's worth of fasting, Mickey, Ryan and Jack prepared for the dinner. Ryan was in a tux and had his hair slicked within fifteen minutes, whereas Mickey took a little more time. "You women," he called through the bathroom door opened only a crack. "What on earth takes so long just to get ready to go out somewhere?"  
  
Ryan heard the sputter of the styling gel as Mickey squeezed it into a soft cone onto her palm then throw the squeeze bottle in the sink. "No one said you had to wait for me," she replied. She ran her fingertips through the puddled goop and painstakingly raked it through her wet curls. "You can go down to the lobby and look for Jack. I'm sure he's already waiting."  
  
Ryan scoffed. "Yeah, that's for sure."  
  
"Ryan!" she cried, thumping her sticky, gel-laden hands onto the counter.  
  
"All right, all right," he mumbled. "Just hurry up, will you? This thing starts in an hour and we don't even know how to get there yet."  
  
Ryan scooped up his rather thinly stocked wallet and stuffed it into his tux pocket along with the room key. With the top button of his shirt still left casually unbuttoned and the untied bowtie hanging limply from both sides of his collar, he left and followed the swinging hall lantern lights toward the stairs. The hotel was small, Ryan admitted wholeheartedly. It had two floors above the ground lobby entrance and diner and had only 27 rooms. The halls appeared to have received a clean coat of blue paint recently, looking glazed and plastic. As Ryan descended the narrow staircase to the first floor, he spied fancy gold room numbers that the upper floors obviously were lacking tacked onto pine doors. They must have been in the middle of a hell of an overhaul when this busy season suddenly sprung up, Ryan surmised. It still had him dumbfounded that a town out in the middle of nowhere land with probably only a citizen count of 300 could ever experience this kind of overfill.  
  
"What a crazy place," he commented amusedly to himself. He stopped in front of a mirror at the end of the hall to comb through the gelled, slicked back mobster-style hair once more—but he didn't touch the bowtie. He wasn't ready yet to choke to death. It was bad enough that Jack had convinced them to go with him to the convention, but Ryan knew it was for the best. God knew there wasn't anything else in the vicinity that could have kept he and Mickey amused and as much as he enjoyed a good comic book, he hadn't brought enough to last a week's worth of nights without television.  
  
The mirror he faced was a large round shape fastened to a decorative, gold metal anchor which didn't seem too well fastened to the wall. He reached out to touch the pimply surface and the metal was as cold as ice. His confused expression reflected back at him, along with a cold, uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Slowly Ryan craned his neck. The hall was empty. He glanced down the staircase. No one. Not even a security camera to be found. Ryan held his breath. There wasn't a sound to be heard. His heart began to race as the feeling of being watched became even stronger. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up pin straight. He took a slow step forward, and then another, each time seeing an inch further down the hall beyond the corner.  
  
"Hello?" The apprehension in his own voice made Ryan uncomfortable. He listened intently. Every part of his body was stiff with anticipation. Nothing moved. No reply. Ryan shook his head. He let out a fluid breath and turned back toward the mirror and reached up to arrange his itchy collar. "You're losing it, buddy, really losing—"  
  
Ryan stopped dead and his eyes widened in terror. A grey form appeared over his shoulder behind his reflection. Instinctively Ryan knew it wasn't a living person that had just walked up the hall. He sensed a malevolent rage wreathed into that invisible stare that was so rancid that he swore he could smell it, like singed hair. Chills and a billion injections of adrenaline ejected into his blood stream. He opened his mouth but that frozen cry lodged itself vigorously in his throat. The face was so pale, the lips blue and purple. He couldn't see the face's features clearly because it was so far away as if were trying to hide around the corner, but the eyes....the eyes.... He blinked and the form vanished, but a frozen hand fell onto his shoulder.  
  
"Oh shit!" he hollered not caring who heard him. He jumped into the stairwell and tore off his tux jacket in a frenzied attempt to rid himself of the lingering sensation of the disembodied hand's grip. A round, encompassing rush of what sounded like wind, or a sigh, swept through the hall and escaped through an unseen portal. He even thought he heard a slight zip of electricity. Ryan frantically searched the hall, the ceiling, looking but finding nothing but a silent, empty corridor. Only a slight rocking of the hanging lanterns met his wandering gaze. Brown and yellow shadows were thrown onto the walls edged to the floor and back again. It took a few good minutes for Ryan to convincingly pep talk himself into stepping back up out of the stairwell before he actually did it. Warily his eyes darted back to the mirror. Nothing but a neat row of quaint hotel doors, the same doors he saw when he looked the opposite way. He rubbed his shoulder intensely as if he were trying to rub off the memory of that icy touch. The feeling of being watched had vanished but he was too spooked to truly be relieved. "Goddamn," he muttered, and took a few sporadic breaths. "Goddamn. Goddamn, friggin'...." Ryan didn't waste another second more than he had to before he spun around and continued down the staircase.  
  
Suddenly a strong wave of smells bulldozed his senses: beer, gravy or sauce, ocean salt, burnt coffee grounds, and a bungle of men and women's colognes trampled in the mix. He followed the overwhelming odors in a daze wondering where they could possibly have come from so suddenly. An army of men and women in business attire, suits and ties barricaded the middle of the tight staircase as he reached the first landing. Each person had a cell phone sewn to their earlobes, talking over each other, through each other, but seemingly not to anyone at all while their other hand gripped handles of blue suitcases with red trim on wheels. None of them seemed to take any notice of him, the pale, haunted looking, half-dressed young man. Ryan could just imagine someone mistaking him for a drunk or high straying wedding party usher. Perhaps that was why they ignored him.  
  
He tried to push past them, knocking into suitcases, elbows, snagging wires connected to cell phone earpieces. Behind the coagulated swarm of businesspeople approached another large noisy group, making the passageway even thicker like blood sealing a freshly torn wound. The noise and the smells made Ryan's head swim. His thoughts were jumbled inside his mind and the conversations billowing up around him hung like fog around his head. Three blonde children all about the age of ten scampered past, straining their voices in a competition for loudest racer. One of those six Nike sneakers pounded like a meat tenderizer onto his toes. Ryan stopped to grab hold of the rail, clenched his teeth and groaned in pain when a large woman in a peacock feather-laden hat, accompanied by two younger men in grey suits and obnoxious ties, bumped into him from behind.  
  
"Watch it, you fool, you'll wrinkle my coat," she bleated to the man behind her on the left. Ryan's eyes were tearing up from the smoke of her cigar waving right in front of him. The woman turned and directed her pouting round face down toward Ryan. "Well?" she demanded in a terse Maine accent. "Are we going to shove off or are you practicing to be a Greek statue? Move it!"  
  
Ryan raised his hand curtly in reply and limped onto the next step. When at last he made it to the lobby he was surrounded by people. The tiny area between the front stained glass doors and the lobby desk (where a haggard- looking desk clerk slaved over an aged computer) was so crammed with people that Ryan couldn't even get off the last step. The stairs happened to be located dead center of the lobby. He still felt chills ripple through his body and the hairs on his neck and arms were still strung out as if he had were full of static electricity. All the people, the realness of the scene before him made him begin to doubt what he thought he experienced. True, he had that "hand" they were searching for on his mind as he was walking. Could his overactive imagination have whipped up that little scene simply from that little mental suggestion? Or could it have been real? Ryan shook away the thought. Until he had reason to dismiss it, he knew he couldn't believe he hadn't actually felt that cold hand, nor could he ignore those eyes or that oppressive, crushing feeling of hate they emanated. It wasn't his imagination. But the fact that he had to walk back through that hall later on that night to get back to his and Mickey's room didn't thrill him.  
  
"Ryan!"  
  
The voice that called out his name he recognized as Jack's but at first he couldn't locate him. Finally he spied a tall, weighty man in a tux and well-groomed rust and white beard over near the doors. He almost didn't recognize Jack if it hadn't for his floppy tweed hat that looked like it housed a few apples under, accented with a neat upturned brim. He was waving his hand and calling out again. Ryan waved his hand in reply and squeezed his way over.  
  
"This place is a mad house," Ryan shouted over the noisy pandemonium of guests.  
  
"You could call it that," Jack nodded with a smile in his eyes. "I called you three or four times, but I guess you couldn't hear me over the commotion." His mouth continued moving but Ryan couldn't hear what was being said.  
  
"What?" he raised his voice and leaned a little closer.  
  
"I said these people must have just arrived by train, because the last one rolled in a only about a half an hour ago. I spoke with the clerk about it."  
  
Ryan nodded half-heartedly. Beads of cold sweat were forming over his brow and he used the rented tux shirt cuff to swipe across his forehead.  
  
"Are you all right?" Jack inquired as he slid his hat further back on his head. "You look like you've seen a ghost."  
  
Ryan's heart sank. If that's fate's way of displaying her sense of humor, he thought miserably, I'm not laughing. He yanked his coat onto his arm and averted eye contact. "No—no, I'm fine. I, uh, I just—just the crowd and everything. Let's wait for Mickey outside, huh? It's warm in here and I'm already tired of carrying around this jacket." 


End file.
